


getaway driver

by delizeita



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Adult Arcobaleno (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!), BAMF Skull (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!), Bad Decisions, Comedy, Crack, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Missions Gone Wrong, Pre-Arcobaleno Curse (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!), Reborn regrets everything, Skull is a petty little shit, stunt driving
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:36:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delizeita/pseuds/delizeita
Summary: In which Reborn regrets asking Skull to drive the getaway car, because Skull, apparently, was a stunt driver for a very good reason.
Relationships: Arcobaleno & Skull (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!), Reborn & Skull (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 799





	1. terrible life decisions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reborn makes a bad decision. A very, very bad decision.

Skull was a stunt driver for a reason, and the other Arcobaleno didn't seem to understand exactly what that meant. Although it wasn't entirely uncommon that a mission went downhill, this was the first time that he had been made their designated driver. Which is why there was no way on earth he was not taking advantage of this opportunity. The thought made him laugh malevolently.

“Lackey, shut up and focus.” 

Reborn, sitting with his legs crossed in the passenger's seat, still hadn't moved the barrel of his gun away from his head as Skull hotwired the car. Trying to ignore him, Skull focused on identifying and cutting the correct wires from under the steering wheel as fast as he could.

Honestly, Reborn was terrible at motivating people. Skull thought he needed to attend a leadership seminar. Or maybe one on how to be a decent human being.

Interrupting his train of thought, Fon suddenly leapt through the open door, gracefully seating himself on the furthest seat from the door while leaving space for their missing companions. 

Breathing hard, he panted, “Lal and Colonnello should be here in a second. Where were you, Verde?”

“One of their men had some interesting flame data,” Verde snapped from the seats they'd erected in the boot. “I collected it, fought and got out of there.” He was uncomfortably squished next to Viper, and Skull felt a thrill of vindication that the scientist was annoyed.

Served him right, the sadist. Skull snorted and focused on starting the car. Fingers moving like lightning, Skull deftly entwined the exposed power wires below the steering column, before rapidly stripping two others and lightly touching them together. Needless to say, he had plenty of experience with this sort of thing.

With a jolt, the car roared to life, and he whooped in excitement, dropping himself into the driver's seat and buckling in just as Lal burst in the door, followed by Colonnello, who was still firing upon their pursuers with a sub-automatic machine gun.

“ _Just drive!_ ”

“ _GO, GO, GO!_ ”

Not even waiting for the door to close, Skull revved the engine, and put his foot down. Heh. They asked for it.

With the horrible sound of screeching tyres on pavement, the car went from zero to a hundred and fifty in ten seconds and Skull whooped in excitement as he felt his head press against the back of his seat with the sudden acceleration.

Colonnello screeched as he almost fell out of the open door, and was rapidly reeled in by Lal. He lost his machine gun, though. Once the door had been slammed shut, and Skull couldn't help himself. It was in his nature to be a jackass.

“ _Ladies and gentlemen,_ welcome onboard this super cool mafia van, with service from right here right now to until Reborn-senpai stops aiming his gun at my head.” Enjoying the exasperated looks on their faces in the rear view mirror, he continues. “Please keep your seat belts fastened and enjoy our complimentary turbulence~.”

With that he _slammed_ on the breaks, skidding around a sharp corner at a dangerously high speed, keeping the accelerator all the way down.

Colonnello, Lal and Fon promptly fell over one another due to the momentum and the fact their seatbelts were not fastened yet. They hit the outside wall of the van with more than a little bit of force, yelping as they piled on top of one another.

“To operate your seat belt insert the metal tab into the buckle and pull tiiiiight!” He snorted at the looks on their faces.

In the passenger seat, he could see that Reborn was starting to have an inkling that this was a very bad idea. _Too late._ He almost wanted to cackle at the thought. He was going to have some _fun._

Skull continued in a serious voice, with an added mocking undertone that he was sure none of the other Arcobaleno missed. “It works just like every other seat belt; if you don’t know how to operate one you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised.”

“Oi, kora, just you wait until-!”

Interrupting Colonnello's protests, Skull slammed on the brakes to pull off a sudden 180-degree lateral spin to skid into the opposite lane of traffic, leaving trails of burnt rubber and smoke on the tarmac behind them.

In the passenger seat, Reborn had a look on his face that Skull had seen on many of his other passengers: it was the one most people made when they wanted to throw up or jump out the window to escape. He was probably fully aware by now that he was in for the ride of his life.

“Alas,” Skull grinned, “smoking and annoying the driver are prohibited for the duration of the ride, but guns and live ammunition are very much _not_. Feel free to blast those guys chasing us into oblivion. It would be much appreciated really.”

“No way in hell, idiot! I need my hands to hang on for dear life!”

“ _It's impossible to aim with your psychotic driving!_ ” Lal hissed.

Skull let out a maniacal laughter and floored the accelerator pedal, beginning to manoeuvre the van through the surrounding vehicles at hilariously high speeds. He had timed the spin perfectly so they could whip around and continue again as fast as possible without doing a barrel roll due to the inertia.

Unfortunately, this usually had the side effect of making the passengers feel like they wanted to throw up.

“You will find the safety briefing card in your seat pocket.” Skull continued to bullshit like a professional. “It has lots of nice pictures. I find it makes a very nice fan on hot days.”

He was going to milk this opportunity for all it was worth.

“Stop making fun of us, idiot!”

“Shut it, lackey.” Reborn snapped.

Ohhh, he was going to take a more ‘fun’ route for that. Spotting a bridge over another road, Skull gunned over it, eyeing the rear-view mirror for their pursuers.

“Today’s ride should take about two hours, but luckily I know a whole ton of shortcuts so we might arrive a little early.”

“Skull, if we die here, I will come back from the afterlife and- _HOLY SHIT!_ ”

With that, Skull yanked the wheel right with no warning and drove straight off the overpass. Screams echoed around the car and there was a lot of flailing about as people hit the roof, windows and each other in their panic. Oh, Reborn was totally going to absolutely murder him after this.

_Worth it._

As intended, the van performed a perfect flip and roughly landed on the road below in between two other vehicles. Skull wasted no time in speeding up and weaving through the other traffic like a maniac.

“Vans aren't supposed to flip, _you absolute imbecile!_ ” Verde shrieked, basically hugging the seat in front of him. Fon had his eyes screwed tightly closed, and Viper was using her mist flames to create ropes to tie herself to the seat.

Skull smirked and Verde paled in the backseat, “ _Watch me!_ ”

For that, Skull set about proving them wrong by performing as many flips and dangerous stunts as he possibly could using the terrain around them. He didn't hesitate to use buildings, overpasses, other cars or basically any drop off that was above five meters tall as ramps for various stunts, jumps and flips.

Of course, Skull was having a great time, but his passengers weren't. The pursuers lost them around five minutes ago, but there was no way in hell Skull was going to tell them that.

“Focus on the road, Skull! I haven't gotten married yet!" Fon yelped as the van once again did a flip while Skull nonchalantly examined his makeup in the rear-view mirror in mid-air.

“Don't you guys have even a little bit of faith in me?” he whined petulantly, turning around in his seat and pouting despite the fact they were going over a hundred and thirty kilometres per hour.

“ _NO!_ ” Skull had never seen the Arcobaleno so united with a single opinion before.

Far from the usually stoic soldier she was, Lal was hugging Colonnello for dear life, eyes screwed shut and insulting the parents of every single person in listening range with a surprisingly wide range of colourful vocabulary under her breath. They had their seatbelts on tightly now.

And, even better, “Are you _praying_ in the back there, Verde?” Skull snickered.

“ _I'm going to need divine intervention to survive your suicidal driving at this rate!_ ” the scientist snarled back, hands clasped together in desperate prayer.

“Mou, I have a concussion from your psychotic driving, Skull, I'm going to need monetary compensation.” Viper sounded from beside him, her voice a strained sort of calm. Skull ignored her.

Fon was chanting, “ _I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die,_ ” on repeat under his breath and Reborn was clutching the overhead car handle so hard his knuckles were white.

Their eyes met, and Reborn smiled unkindly at him, eyes furious. “You are _dead_ , lackey.”

He merely cackled at their protests, flipping Reborn the bird in the passenger seat and pressing the accelerator down even further.

Skull was honestly a little sad when he pulled up at the front of their hideout. But what he wasn't sad about was watching the rest of the Arcobaleno try to disembark.

The door slammed open and Colonnello tumbled out of the van as fast as he could, and Skull swore that he was crying with relief while he lay on the hard ground. Lal rapidly followed, joining him on the floor while Reborn used the bonnet to support his shaking legs. Verde had run off to throw up in a bush somewhere, Fon was on his knees with his eyes closed next to Colonnello, and Viper was still catatonic in her seat.

Wanting to have the last laugh, he announced loudly, smirking, “Thank you for choosing Skull-sama's Joyrides and hope you enjoyed your trip!”

With that, Skull hightailed it out of there before the others could recover enough to beat him up. 

Yells of outrage echoed behind him.


	2. bad influences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skull is getting dodgy vibes from this Checkerface dude, like, serious dodgy vibes.

Looking back, Skull first realised that annoying Reborn was fun was the moment Skull insulted his hat. Like, less than thirty seconds after they met. Actually, annoying all the Arcobaleno was great fun, but none of them reacted better than the World’s Greatest Hitman.

At the time of the first meeting Skull had been more than a little bit confused. Checkerface had done his dodgy masked sales pitch after appearing in his personal caravan, and had handed over the invitation with a promise of power, and then dramatically disappeared.

Had he mentioned the mafia? No.

Had he said anything that was actually informative? No.

Had he tried to sell this ‘I Prescelti Sette’ thing like Darth Vader telling Luke to join the Dark side? Uh, yes.

Had Skull believed his promise of power? Hell no. Not for a second. The dude was one of the dodgiest he’d ever met, and he was a member of a travelling circus. He’d seen his fair share of dodgy people

He’d spent three days saying nope, sayonara, piss off and have a nice day, until he had realised that the ever-present nagging feeling in his gut for the past two years had been boredom all along.

Skull was functionally immortal. He’d been very young when he had figured out that the weird purple flames he had were responsible for him healing faster than the other kids his age. 

Like, _a lot_ faster. 

Skull was born in a very small town in the wilderness of Russia. With barely a hundred inhabitants, he had grown up knowing everything about everybody. Nothing was private, and all the people living there were strangely protective over one another and their little community.

His parents loved him and his sister very much, and the old ladies who lived across the road would give him her leftover cooking every now and then. They were family friends with the grocer, all of his customers, the mailman, the hermit on the hill, all the children in the entire town and their families, and literally everyone within a ten kilometer radius. 

It was small and very open. Most food was imported from the nearby metropolis (which was about a five hour drive away), but for some reason, building materials and the like were never bought in.

Skull knew that his village was a special kind of crazy.

Each person living in it formed the strongest connections with one another, but also the most volatile. The individuals were eccentric in the best of ways. They took care of one another and the town they lived in, there was no doubt about that, but many formed fierce rivalries about, from what Skull could see, nothing much at all. People would suddenly leave one day without warning, and return years later with tales of a scarily large, yet amazing world. They always returned without fail.

Skull often wondered if they were all related, because nearly every single person he knew had some shade of purple in their eyes. His mother had laughed herself to tears when he asked her, before fervently denying that they were related to everyone else, but confirming that they were a family in every way but blood.

Another strange thing was that outsiders and visitors were secretly frowned upon. His mother would always send them disapproving looks with violet eyes, murmuring something about _‘unwelcome’_ and _‘encroaching’_. Skull had asked multiple people about why they disliked other people, but they’d just grinned at him, ruffled his hair and told him he’d understand when he was older. 

Skull knew without a doubt that he loved them all. He was loved, very, very loved, and he’d protect them until his dying breath. 

He grew up tussling with the other purple-eyed children, and running through the streets full of laughter and love, just like any other kid.

But even so, he wasn’t like any other kid. He never noticed his cuts because they healed as quickly as they formed. Bruises were non-existent and broken bones ached for only minutes before they disappeared.

The first time he realised something was up was when he was seven and his elder sister had broken her arm from falling down the stairs. Skull vividly remembered being very confused when she spent weeks healing. He’d purposely fallen out of the tall tree in their backyard the very next day, breaking both of his own, as an experiment of sorts. They had completely healed in seconds, and he didn’t even feel the pain.

Rather than being disturbed or worried, Skull went _‘omg that’s so cool!’_ and ran off to go and do every single dangerous thing his parents had specifically told him not to.

After sliding down the railings of the stairs too many times to count, climbing on top of the roof of his house and creating his own lean-to shack against the chimney, playing with lots of big pointy sticks and climbing every single tall tree he could find, Skull realised that being unable to get injured meant he could do even more fun things.

His next-door neighbours caught him once, but all they did was laugh at his mussed up hair with glowing purple eyes creased with joy, before handing him cookies and an even bigger stick than the one he was currently holding, before pointing him in the direction of an even taller tree to climb.

His self-healing got stronger as he got older, and by the time he was eleven, even major injuries healed in seconds.

His sister had slapped him upside the head and complained under her breath, “you damn little adrenaline junkie,” when she had caught him climbing the roof late one afternoon while their parents were out, before only promising not to tell them if he gave her his candy stash. Skull had agreed easily.

And then late one night whe Skull was twelve, he nicked his father’s motorbike to take it out for a spin. 

It was true love at first ride.

It took him three weeks of puppy dog eyes and pouty faces before his father cracked and let him ride it again. With parent supervision, of course. Even so, his presence on the back of the motorcycle did literally nothing to curb Skull’s inherent lack of self-preservation skills. One of the old ladies across the road had been howling with laughter at his father when they had finally returned. The other one wore a wry grin.

Skull wasn’t allowed within a fifty metre radius of the motorbike for another three months.

His father was Not Happy. His first Not Happy passenger, in fact. The first of many, many such passengers.

And with that, Skull decided he wanted to be a stunt driver in the future. His parents were less than thrilled. The milkman gave him silent thumbs up when he told him, and by the end of the day, the entire town knew, and was very supportive of him following his dreams.

His mother said to his father, “Don’t worry dear, he’ll grow out of it one day.”

His father replied, “I really f***ing hope so.”

His sister laughed at them so hard she fell off the sofa.

But by the time he was fifteen, his parents had accepted that their son had as little self-preservation as he had sanity (which was next to nothing whatsoever) and was probably borderline suicidal on top of that. 

Being the great parents that they were, they accepted his love for crazy and dangerous stunts based on the fact that he never seemed to get injured, and even resignedly signed him up for stunt classes with the circus that was visiting their town.

Skull excelled at it.

See, the perks of his special type of immortality meant that the healthy fear of death that held most stuntmen in its grip didn’t apply to him. With near total pain immunity and the ability to recover from fatal injuries in seconds, he was able to become much, much better than his competition, with the potential to become much more.

The circus loved him nearly as much as his village did, and left as scheduled three weeks later after literally showering him with employment offers, promotional pamphlets and promises of death-defying stunts and _freedom_. 

Skull was like, hell yes count me in. But his parents said no and his sister said no and his entire town said no and Skull realised that joining meant leaving his home and his family and his town. Then it was all too easy to decline.

The circus people weren’t really happy about that so they negotiated. _Eighteen,_ they said, _live your life here until you’re an adult, then travel the world with us. We won’t hold you down. Being a member of the circus means to be free._

His parents hemmed and hawed, but in the end, it was Skull’s choice and they knew the value of freedom, so they smiled when he accepted it, glowing with happiness all the while.

And that was how Skull de Mort became a professional stuntman and hyperactive adrenaline junkie, much to the horror and resignation of his poor parents. His older sister, however, had just sighed and said that he had a special kind of insanity that made him perfect for the job.

And now, at the age of twenty-three, a world famous stuntman, this Checkerface dude sneaks into his room and hands him the dodgiest offer he’s ever heard in his life, and expects him to take it and be _grateful._

Please. This guy was literally the reason stranger danger was invented. All he was missing was a white van and lollipops, and then he’d be set.

Skull didn’t even know what the hell he was talking about. Like, he was talking about the clouds and the weather, but it was perfectly nice and sunny outside? And then he started talking about fire and Skull’s first thought was ‘Is this guy alright in the head?’

He didn’t speak Latin or Italian or Spanish or whatever language ‘I Prescelti Sette’ was, but he had enough background knowledge to guess that it was probably code for a cult of pyromaniacs who liked astrology or something. 

So, Skull just awkwardly smiled and confusedly accepted the invite, mentally promising to throw it away the first chance he gets.

That was probably the smart thing to do.

But then again, when has Skull ever had a sense of self-preservation?

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you had as much fun reading this as I did writing it!
> 
> Don't forget to leave a kudos or a comment if you enjoyed :D


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